HTC One review: an amazing screen but why only 4MPs?

HTC One: one of the few phones that can match the iPhone’s standards of feel and finish

With a screen that boasts a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and a design that has a full aluminum body and is being talked about as a match for the iPhone 5, the new HTC One is the first high-end smartphone to catch expert’s eye this year.

Many reviewers say it’s the best Android phone on the market — but that could easily change when the Galaxy S4 is launched in the coming weeks.

Although the HTC One packs as many pixels “as you’d find on a 50-inch TV set,” says the Guardian. “You’d have to line up three iPhone 5s, side by side, to show as much detail as you can on one HTC One screen. That doesn’t mean the screen is three times as useful. These pixels are just so small that the eye can’t take advantage of the full resolution.”

And with only a 4MP image sensor it is hardly going to bother smart moviemakers.

“It’s well known that boosting the megapixel count of camera sensors doesn’t really do much for the image quality, but phone and camera makers can’t seem to stop using megapixel count as a marketing tool, so the megapixels keep climbing. HTC has finally taken a stand against this trend, with a camera sensor that has only 4MP of resolution. It’s a timid stand, though, as HTC doesn’t actually tell you it’s a 4MP sensor,” says the Guardian’s review.

The new HTC is using what it calls an ‘Ultrapixel’ camera.

“The story is that the sensor pixels are twice as big as they are in most phone cameras, which means they can gather more light. More light per pixel means better pictures in indoor lighting, at least in theory. In practice, I found the images to be better than those of other Android phones in low lighting, but not as good as those from the iPhone 5, which are of higher resolution. Low-light pictures taken on the HTC One do show relatively little ‘noise’ – which usually looks like coloured speckles – but the images aren’t particularly crisp,” the Guardian notes.

Joanna Stern, from ABC News sums up the new HTC One best: “Yes, its camera and battery performance hold it back from being the perfect smartphone, but those other attributes set a new bar in the Android phone market. But there’s no ignoring that Samsung’s Galaxy S4 will be coming out soon and promises a host of new features and an impressive 13-megapixel camera.”

So if you are thinking of making movies on your smartphone perhaps wait a couple of week’s to see how the new Samsung is received – and even wait a little longer for a new iPhone 5S, which is rumoured to be coming out as early as this June.